This specification relates to digital information retrieval, and particularly to processing search results to facilitate search operations.
The Internet provides access to a wide variety of resources, for example, video files, image files, audio files, or Web pages including content for particular subjects, book articles, or news articles. A search system can select one or more resources in response to receiving a search query. A search query is data that a user submits to a search engine to satisfy the user's informational needs. The search system selects and scores resources based on their relevance to the search query and on their importance relative to other resources to provide search results that link to the selected resources. The search results are typically ordered according to the scores, and provided in a search results page.
The search results page displays a list of search results, and each search result includes several lines of text (a “snippet”) that are intended to show how the page is relevant to the query. When a user clicks on a search result, the user's client device requests the resource—typically a web page—that the search result references. When the page is received at the client device, however, the user may have to manually search the page to find the relevant content, even if the snippet included the exact content they want. The users often must either scroll through the page to find the relevant content, or perform a manual word search operation by use of a browser word search tool.